Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Aristotle's Poetics

Aristotle's Poetics

Aristotle
Butcher, S. H.
Fergusson, Francis

Paperback

Series: Dramabook,, Book 27

Literary CriticismWriting InstructionGeneral Poetry

Publisher Price: $16.00

ISBN10: 0809005271
ISBN13: 9780809005277
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Published: Jan 1 1961
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.20
Height: 0.34 Width: 4.54 Depth: 7.30
Language: English

Introduced by Francis Fergusson, the Poetics, written in the fourth century B.C., is still an essential study of the art of drama, indeed the most fundamental one we have. It has been used by both playwrights and theorists of many periods, and interpreted, in the course of its two thousand years of life, in various ways. The literature which has accumulated around it is, as Mr. Fergusson points out, full of disputes so erudite that the nonspecialist can only look on in respectful silence. But the Poetics itself is still with us, in all its suggestiveness, for the modern reader to make use of in his turn and for his own purposes.

Francis Fergusson's lucid, informative, and entertaining Introduction will prove invaluable to anyone who wishes to understand and appreciate the Poetics. Using Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, as Aristotle did, to illustrate his analysis, Mr. Fergusson pints out that Aristotle did not lay down strict rules, as is often thought: The Poetics, he says, is much more like a cookbook than it is like a textbook of elementary engineering. Read in this way, it is an essential guide not only to Sophoclean tragedy, but to the work of so modern a playwright as Bertolt Brecht, who considered his own epic drama the first non-Aristotelian form.

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